Healing Your Inner Child

Like a movie in my mind I can rewind my life back to moments of my childhood that still lurk in my corners and edges of my world today.

My first dance recital.
My first trip to the cottage.
Visiting my grandparents in Wiarton.
Kissing my first crush Matthew Pelkey on the bus (Kindergarten)
Being told I’m a good girl for giving things to others.

These are memories that are easy to remember for the most part. They don’t hold a lot of charge for me, I try to maintain an inner world where nothing in the past holds a lot of charge for me. But they tend to lurk in my subconscious mind, altering or affecting my daily life in some minimal capacity.

I can show up boldly in my work because I remember the elated feeling of being on stage. I love presenting and sharing what I’m passionate about!

That first trip to the cottage helped me to discover my love for nature and the healing power it held for me. I’ll never forget how even at 10, the silence of the still lake in the morning eased my nervous system.

Those trips to Wiarton to see my paternal grandparents, though few and short, held big impact for me. For some reason I really took my grandmother’s words to heart. Luckily she was for the most part kind, but very much bold. I like to think I have this quality now too.

That first crush would lead to a lifelong journey of romanticizing my life and the people in it. I simply love everyone so much. I adore how charming and loving and joyful life is when you see it through this lens of romance.

Being told I’m a good girl for creating and gifting items to others was a multi-generational habit on my mother’s side of people pleasing that I chose, and continue to choose, to break. It took me years to know how to properly gift something to someone without the perceived obligation attached to it.

Five random memories that came to me in while writing this and five ways in which they still impact and shape my life today.

Yet people ask me all the time… “Why do we need to heal our inner child?”

There is a tender place within each of us. A part that still remembers the sound of laughter that rang without shame… the freedom to play, feel, express, and imagine without limits. She is the heartbeat of your joy, your spontaneity, your wonder.

This is your inner child.

But when life brought pain—through rejection, abandonment, harshness, or pressure—she learned to hide. To protect herself, to stay safe.

Many of the women I work with and know intimately in my community carry the same wounds that were seeded, sprouted and took root in childhood. We carry these beliefs that have been passed down from the generations before us and created by their fear, shame, guilt and pain.

Things like…
I’m too much
I’m not enough
I have to be perfect
Love only comes if I sacrifice first

These are the echoes of your unmet needs. Though they happened in childhood, they live on in our nervous systems, our relationships, our bodies, our inner critic and our wounds.

What I want you to know is this: healing is always possible. It begins with reparenting ourselves with the love we’ve always deserved, needed and wanted.

An invitation to begin

Reading this might be your first attempt at understanding how to heal your inner child, and to that I say: Bravo! This is brave work. I applaud you for your exploration. Truly.

Healing isn’t about repair or revisiting the old wounds. Healing is our capacity to be with all of ourselves - mind, body and soul. Healing the inner child means becoming a compassionate, wise, and loving presence for the younger you—especially in the moments she felt most alone.

It’s a sacred return.
A remembering.
A reclamation.

It’s choosing to:

•  Validate your younger self
•  Offer her safety and presence
•  Celebrate her joy and playful spirit
•  Protect her boundaries and keep her safe
•  Let her be free again

This isn’t about blaming your caregivers or staying stuck in the past—it’s about weaving light into places that were left in the dark. Those who were in charge of your care truly did the best they could. I know that might be hard to believe if you had a very negative or bad experience growing up. Please remember that people who are hurting or suffering or experience pain on any level do not know how to care for others in a kind, compassionate or loving way. They are seeking love themselves and when they don’t get it they hurt others unknowingly. Let go of the mindset of being a victim, as that won’t serve you, ever.

Healing your inner child is about integration, wholeness, and becoming your own source of unconditional love. If you are ready to move forward in that way, then read on.

How you know your inner child needs healing:

A lot of the time people don’t truly know how much their inner child is running the show of their life, so allow me to lend you a hand here in understanding how you can see if your inner child is in need of some nurturing.

• You have big emotional blocks but don’t know why they are present.
• You feel guilt or shame without any understanding of why
• You notice that you are like your families in ways that upset you
• Something traumatic happened when you were younger and you can’t think about it without feeling dread or sadness. You also feel it limiting you in your career, relationships or other areas of your life. You just can’t get past it.
• You fear abandonment, rejection, betrayal or any other form of not receiving love and validation from others.
• Your actions are rooted in over-giving and you often feel obligated to do things for others rather than desiring to do them just because.
• You struggle to rest, play, choose joy, feel peace or relax without guilt or shame.
• You have heated emotional reactions that are unwarranted and seem to come out of nowhere.

I want you to know that these things are not bad. They’re actually very clear signals from your inner child that she is desiring to be seen, heard and understood. She’s also using these experiences as a sacred invitation for you to finally heal.

{Re}connect with her

If the above resonates with you then I invite you to take some time every day—just 5-10 minutes—to give her some space to come to the surface and be held.

Inner child ritual:

1. Hands over your heart and womb. Invite younger you to come forward into your consciousness.
2. Speak to her. Tell her things like “I love you, I’m here for you, I’m ready to love you the way you deserve to be loved” or anything else that intuitively rises up within you.
3. Listen with your intuitive heart. Allow images, memories, feelings, words and sensations to arise within you. Try to just observe rather than alter.
4. Re-parent her. Offer her what she wants. Most often I find it’s just being seen / validation. The best person she can receive that from is you. She just needs your presence.

This can be and should be repeated as often as is necessary. As I said, doing this daily if you are just starting out with inner child healing will greatly benefit your journey right now.

You hold all the love you need.

A lot of people want to receive love from their caregiver, or they want them to apologize or understand what they went through… what I can tell you is this: you cannot change other people or the past. You can only change how YOU hold it in your body and how YOU respond to it.

When you begin to nurture your inner child you’ll notice that you soften, you reclaim your joy, you remember how it feels to live from wonder and love rather than fear and you stop abandoning yourself in pursuit of being loved by others.

And slowly, with grace and patience, you become a deeply loving Mother to yourself. The Mother you always needed and deserved.

YOU give that younger part of you rest.
YOU give her the power of being seen.
YOU give her the freedom to fly.
YOU are the one you’ve been waiting for.

This is sacred, deep soul healing work.
Keep walking towards your innate worthiness by the rhythm of the earth beneath your feet.

In devotion,
Emily